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Bench Warmer
Young starting pitchers are protected like baby chicks in the major leagues these days, but the shift in thinking on pitch count extends beyond guys like Joba Chamberlain and David Price. Managers and pitching coaches have become much more regimented in regulating the work of their relievers. Most teams -- if not all -- monitor how often a reliever warms up, how many pitches are thrown during the warm-ups and how often they actually pitch, in a way that nobody would've dreamed of a decade ago.
One of the greatest half-season performances I ever saw was that of Roger McDowell for the Baltimore Orioles in 1996. Davey Johnson asked him again and again to take the ball, and McDowell -- who honored the bullpen code and didn't complain -- kept taking the ball. For the first 10 weeks of the season, he and Roberto Alomar were probably the two most valuable members of the Orioles. He threw 19 2/3 innings in April, another 20 1/3 in May. Forty innings in the first two months of the season.
And, of course, by the end of June, his career was all but over, because he broke down. Seasons are often won and lost because of early-season reliever abuse.
When Joe Torre managed the Yankees, he ran through right-handed relievers the way a teenager goes through firecrackers on the Fourth of July. One of them actually approached a rival executive and begged him to make a deal for the pitcher, so that he could get away from Torre.
But 10 weeks into the 2009 season, the workloads for most of the primary relievers in the AL appear perfectly reasonable, with only a couple of spots to watch. Here are the relievers with the heaviest workloads among the teams with a chance of contending for the crown in the AL East; sorry, Baltimore. (We'll go division-by-division over the next week).
One of the greatest half-season performances I ever saw was that of Roger McDowell for the Baltimore Orioles in 1996. Davey Johnson asked him again and again to take the ball, and McDowell -- who honored the bullpen code and didn't complain -- kept taking the ball. For the first 10 weeks of the season, he and Roberto Alomar were probably the two most valuable members of the Orioles. He threw 19 2/3 innings in April, another 20 1/3 in May. Forty innings in the first two months of the season.
And, of course, by the end of June, his career was all but over, because he broke down. Seasons are often won and lost because of early-season reliever abuse.
When Joe Torre managed the Yankees, he ran through right-handed relievers the way a teenager goes through firecrackers on the Fourth of July. One of them actually approached a rival executive and begged him to make a deal for the pitcher, so that he could get away from Torre.
But 10 weeks into the 2009 season, the workloads for most of the primary relievers in the AL appear perfectly reasonable, with only a couple of spots to watch. Here are the relievers with the heaviest workloads among the teams with a chance of contending for the crown in the AL East; sorry, Baltimore. (We'll go division-by-division over the next week).
